The City of Macon Bibb, GA set out to establish a comprehensive lighting plan for the city – one that would improve public safety and upgrade the existing infrastructure while maintaining the region’s strong commitment to sustainability. When the city and county governments merged in January of 2014, a strong commitment was made to ensure that city and county residents were being served in an equitable manner. This posed an additional challenge on an already resource constrained government as 235 local employees retired at the time of the merger.
By partnering with Signify to automate the maintenance and management of the street lighting through a control system, the government could manage more maintenance requests with fewer resources. The city officials also worked strategically with Georgia Power to standardize the utility owned lights with the same Philips Lighting products that the city was procuring to ensure consistency and resiliency. Standardization of the infrastructure would make it easier to maintain their lighting assets and would result in cost savings. In an effort to simplify their procurement processes, Macon Bibb developed a contracting vehicle known as a “master agreement.” This approach allowed for lighting upgrades to be made regardless of application - whether for street lighting, decorative lighting, dynamic color changing lights, indoor lighting, site and area lighting along with state of the art lighting controls technology that would monitor and manage lighting assets.
As the new lighting was installed, the local media coverage and the public’s reaction to the project was positive and favorable across the region. Neighborhoods reported loving the color of the new lights. Along the interstate, the city transportation department has been receiving calls from drivers that the light is much improved, and they can see the road conditions more clearly. Through the course of installing the new lighting systems, the public housing communities were inspired to be part of the planning, and new lighting will be installed around these communities. The pedestrian bridge lighting project near Mercer University is truly the lighting plan’s centerpiece as it has augmented a master plan to move people closer to the university. The bridge lighting has played a major role in the desirability of the location for people to move and use the amenities surrounding the university such as the major transportation thoroughfares near there.